Baseball: an automatic question-answerer

<u>Baseball</u> is a computer program that answers questions phrased in ordinary English about stored data. The program reads the question from punched cards. After the words and idioms are looked up in a dictionary, the phrase structure and other syntactic facts are determined for a content analysis, which lists attribute-value pairs specifying the information given and the information requested. The requested information is then extracted from the data matching the specifications, and any necessary processing is done. Finally, the answer is printed. The program's present context is baseball games; it answers such questions as "Where did each team play on July 7?"